At a Glance
Petersburg, Virginia Union, and the Decision to Go South
Charles Sherrod was formed by the double inheritance of Baptist faith and southern Black life — a combination that gave him both a moral vocabulary for understanding injustice and a direct experience of it. Growing up in Petersburg, Virginia, in the 1940s and 1950s meant growing up in a city whose racial order was comprehensive and whose enforcement was backed by the full apparatus of Virginia's Jim Crow system: segregated schools, segregated public facilities, systematic exclusion from political participation, and the economic dependency that made challenging any of this personally costly. Petersburg was not the Deep South's most violently enforced apartheid, but it was apartheid nonetheless, and Sherrod understood it as such from an early age.
His enrolment at Virginia Union University in Richmond placed him in one of the historically Black institutions that the Black community had built within the architecture of segregation — institutions that provided education and professional formation to Black students who were barred from the state's white universities, and that had, by the late 1950s, become centres of political ferment as the sit-in movement spread from Greensboro across the South. Sherrod was part of the Richmond student community that launched sit-in demonstrations in 1960, an experience that connected him to the national movement and to SNCC, which was forming at exactly this moment as the organisational expression of the student direct action energy that the Greensboro sit-ins had released.
His appointment as SNCC's first field secretary in 1961 was both a recognition of his commitment and a statement about SNCC's organisational philosophy: the organisation believed that genuine community organising required people who were willing to go to hostile places, stay, build relationships, and develop local leadership rather than importing national leaders for dramatic confrontations and then withdrawing. Sherrod was being asked to embody this philosophy in practice, and his willingness to do so — to go to southwest Georgia, one of the most dangerous organising environments in the country — defined the subsequent shape of his life.
Albany, Georgia: Organising a Community in the Black Belt
Albany in October 1961 was precisely the kind of community that the civil rights movement had been slow to engage: a mid-sized city in the southwest Georgia Black Belt, far from the major urban centres where the movement's most visible campaigns had been fought, with a Black population of approximately forty percent that was systematically excluded from political life but that had not yet developed the organisational infrastructure for sustained direct action. Sherrod and Reagon arrived with no organisational presence, no community relationships, and almost no resources — just themselves and their training in nonviolent direct action and their conviction that the community was ready to move if given the right organisational support.
They began in the churches, because the churches were where the community gathered and where the trust that organising required could be built. They held small meetings, listened to community members, and gradually constructed the picture of what Albany's Black community needed and what it was willing to risk. The work was slow and required the patience of people who understood that genuine organising is not the organisation of a demonstration but the development of a community's capacity for collective action — a capacity that cannot be imported from outside but must be grown from within.
By November 1961, the organisational groundwork was sufficient to launch the Albany Movement: the coalition of local organisations — the Ministerial Alliance, the Federation of Women's Clubs, the NAACP, the student groups that Sherrod and Reagon had been meeting with — that gave the movement its community base. The November demonstrations against the segregated bus terminal were the visible expression of the organising that had been going on since October, and the response — mass arrests, with hundreds of demonstrators filling the city jail — validated the strategic theory that the Albany Black community was ready to sustain a major campaign.
The Albany Movement and What It Taught: Pritchett, King, and the Limits of Confrontation
The Albany Movement's particular importance in the civil rights movement's strategic history lies not in its victories — it achieved fewer formal desegregation commitments than Birmingham or Selma — but in the lessons it taught about what worked and what didn't, lessons that shaped every major campaign that followed. The movement's most instructive antagonist was not a brutal enforcer in the Bull Connor mode but Police Chief Laurie Pritchett, a man of calculated shrewdness who had studied the civil rights movement's methods before Albany's campaign began and who had developed a counter-strategy specifically designed to deny the movement the nationally visible brutality it needed to generate federal intervention.
Pritchett's strategy was to accept all demonstrators nonviolently into custody — to make mass arrests without violence, without cattle prods, without fire hoses, without the images that would shock northern viewers and force presidential action. He dispersed arrested demonstrators to jails in Lee County, Terrell County, Mitchell County, and other surrounding counties, preventing the single-location mass incarceration that had produced pressure in other campaigns. He literally studied Gandhi before Albany; he understood that nonviolent demonstrators needed their opponents' violence to make their moral argument visible, and he denied them that violence.
Martin Luther King Jr. came to Albany in December 1961, drawn by the movement's scale and by his personal friendship with several Albany leaders, and found himself in a situation more strategically complex than any he had previously encountered. He was arrested twice in Albany; he settled for negotiated commitments that the city government then refused to honour; and the movement's inability to produce the decisive confrontation that had worked in Montgomery and would work in Birmingham left the Albany campaign without a clear victory narrative. The SCLC's post-Albany assessment — that campaigns needed specific, concrete, winnable demands rather than broad desegregation demands, and that the choice of campaign city needed to include assessment of the local official's likely response — directly shaped the Birmingham campaign's design.
Sherrod's understanding of what happened in Albany was more nuanced than the simple "failure" narrative that sometimes attaches to the campaign. The Albany Movement had organised a community, had developed local leadership, had demonstrated that Black Albanians were willing to fill the jails for their rights, and had permanently altered the political landscape of southwest Georgia. The formal desegregation commitments that the campaign had sought were not obtained in 1962, but the political power that Black Albanians had demonstrated — and that Sherrod continued to help develop and exercise for the next six decades — was real and lasting.
Staying: The Decision That Defined a Career
When the Albany Movement's formal campaign phase wound down in late 1962 and early 1963, virtually every outside organiser who had come to Albany left. The SCLC moved on to Birmingham. SNCC workers moved to Mississippi and other campaigns. The pattern of outside organising — arriving for the campaign, departing when the campaign ended — was the norm across the civil rights movement, for understandable reasons: there were too many communities that needed organising and too few organisers to stay permanently in all of them.
Sherrod stayed. He married Shirley Miller, an Albany native who had become active in the movement, and he made Albany his permanent home. The decision was not presented in his accounts as a grand strategic choice but as a natural consequence of his commitment to the community he had helped to organise — he had come to Albany to build something, and building something required staying to see it built. The decision also reflected his theological conviction that genuine pastoral and prophetic work required rootedness in a specific community over time, not the itinerant work of the professional organiser who moves from campaign to campaign.
What staying made possible was visible in the decades that followed: the building of New Communities, the electoral work on the city council, the continued development of local leadership capacity, the sustained engagement with economic development and food security issues that shorter-term campaigns could not have produced. Sherrod's Albany is not a story of a great campaign that ended in 1962 but of a community whose political and economic development has been shaped, over more than six decades, by the presence of an organiser who chose to make it his life's work.
New Communities: Black Land and the Fight Against USDA Discrimination
The establishment of New Communities, Inc. in 1969 was the most ambitious expression of Sherrod's vision of economic justice as the necessary complement to political rights. The community land trust — established on approximately six thousand acres of farmland in Lee County, Georgia — was designed to provide Black farming families with the land access that the discriminatory practices of the federal agricultural system had systematically denied them. The United States Department of Agriculture's Farmers Home Administration had a long and well-documented history of denying loans and disaster relief to Black farmers on terms that were routinely extended to white farmers, a practice that had contributed to the dramatic decline in Black farm ownership across the South in the decades following the Second World War.
New Communities was a direct response to this dispossession: a collective land ownership structure that removed the farmland from the individual ownership model that made Black farmers vulnerable to the discriminatory credit system, and that provided a stable agricultural base for the community's economic development. At its peak, it was the largest Black-owned land trust in American history — a remarkable achievement of institution-building in one of the most economically hostile environments available to Black agricultural enterprise in the post-civil-rights-era South.
The organisation was forced into foreclosure in 1985 after the USDA denied it the disaster relief loans that drought had made necessary and that were routinely extended to white farming operations. The loss of six thousand acres of Black-owned farmland — built through years of community effort and representing an irreplaceable asset for the community's economic future — was a devastating blow. But Sherrod and the community members who had built New Communities continued to fight, and in 2010, as part of the landmark Pigford v. Glickman class action settlement over the USDA's history of racial discrimination against Black farmers, New Communities received a thirteen-million-dollar settlement — the largest single payout in the case. The settlement did not restore the lost land, but it was an acknowledgment of the wrong that had been done and a resource for rebuilding.
Six Decades in Albany: The Long Work of Community Building
Charles Sherrod has been in Albany, Georgia, since October 1961 — more than six decades as of this writing. He has watched the city transform from the site of mass arrests and confrontations with Laurie Pritchett to a city with Black elected officials, including the mayors and council members whose presence reflected the political transformation that the movement had produced. He served on the Albany City Council himself for multiple terms, working through the institutional channels that the movement had opened to pursue economic development, community investment, and anti-poverty programmes that direct action alone could not have achieved.
His continued presence in Albany is itself a form of testimony — a demonstration, visible and embodied, that the civil rights movement was not a series of dramatic campaigns that ended in 1965 but an ongoing commitment to the building of communities in which Black people could live with dignity, exercise political power, and participate fully in the economic life of the society they had helped to build. The work of building those communities — the land trusts, the cooperatives, the local political organisations, the food security programmes — is unglamorous work that generates no nationally broadcast footage and no presidential speeches, but it is the work that determines whether the formal political rights that the movement won have substantive content in the lives of the people who hold them.
Sherrod has described his understanding of his life's work in explicitly theological terms: as a calling to be present with a specific community in the long and patient work of justice, rather than the short and visible work of confrontation. The distinction matters — not because confrontation was wrong or unnecessary, but because confrontation without community building leaves communities with rights they cannot exercise and victories they cannot sustain. He understood this in 1961, when he came to Albany and began building the relationships and institutions that made the Albany Movement possible, and he has continued to understand it in the six decades since, when he has continued building the relationships and institutions that make Albany's ongoing development possible.